“Security Cameras Caught Him Entering. They Never Caught Him Leaving. What Happened to Brian Shaffer?”
The Impossible Disappearance of Brian Shaffer
The Night Everything Changed
1:55 AM, April 1, 2006
The security camera captured it all in grainy black and white—a young man standing outside a bar entrance, laughing with two women he’d just met. His body language was loose, relaxed. He swayed slightly, the way people do after too many drinks on a Saturday night. His hair was mussed. His shirt had come untucked. He looked like every other twenty-something college kid celebrating the start of spring break in Columbus, Ohio.
Brian Shaffer said goodbye to the women. The timestamp on the surveillance footage read 1:55 AM. He turned toward the entrance of the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a popular bar packed into the second floor of the South Campus Gateway building near Ohio State University. Through the glass doors behind him, you could see the crowd still thick inside—students unwilling to let the night end, bartenders wiping down counters, bouncers beginning the slow process of clearing everyone out.
Brian walked back toward those doors. The camera caught him from behind now—his broad shoulders, his characteristic walk. He was 6’2″, hard to miss in any crowd. The footage showed him reaching for the door handle.
And then he was gone.
Not gradually. Not in some way that made sense. He simply ceased to exist in the visual record. The cameras that had documented his arrival, his departure to talk to those women, his return to the entrance—those same cameras would spend the next five minutes recording every single person who left the Ugly Tuna Saloona when it closed at 2:00 AM.
Sixty to seventy people filed out. Drunk students stumbling toward High Street. Bartenders heading home after a long shift. Bouncers locking up behind them. Every face captured. Every body counted.
Brian Shaffer was not among them.
For nineteen years, investigators, journalists, armchair detectives, and Brian’s devastated family have tried to answer one impossible question: How does a man walk into a room with security cameras on every exit and simply vanish?
This is the story of the night Brian Shaffer disappeared. But more than that, it’s the story of what happens when the people you trust most can’t—or won’t—tell you what really happened. It’s about grief compounded by mystery, about a father who died searching for his son, about a best friend who refuses to explain why he won’t take a lie detector test.
And it’s about sixty to seventy people who all left a bar on the same night, never knowing that one person who should have been among them would become one of America’s most baffling missing persons cases.
Two Weeks Earlier: The Funeral
To understand why Brian Shaffer was at the Ugly Tuna Saloona on March 31, 2006, you have to understand what happened two weeks before that night. You have to understand that Brian wasn’t just blowing off steam or celebrating spring break. He was trying to outrun grief so crushing it threatened to swallow him whole.
Renee Shaffer died on March 15, 2006.
She was fifty-eight years old. She’d been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer just months earlier—the kind that moves fast, that doesn’t respond to treatment, that steals someone from their family before anyone has time to process what’s happening. One day Renee was planning her garden for spring. The next, she was in hospice care.
Brian had been close to his mother in that particular way that oldest sons often are—protective, devoted, more comfortable discussing his feelings with her than with his father or younger brother. When Renee got sick, Brian put his life on hold. He was in his second year of medical school at Ohio State, drowning in coursework and clinical rotations, but he drove home to Pickerington whenever he could. He sat with her. He held her hand. He tried to be strong because that’s what she needed, even though inside he was falling apart.
The funeral had been held at a church in their hometown, about thirty minutes southeast of Columbus. Brian stood next to his father Randy and his younger brother Derek, receiving condolences from relatives and friends who kept saying the same useless things people always say at funerals. She’s in a better place now. At least she’s not suffering anymore. Time heals all wounds.
But time wasn’t healing anything for Brian. If anything, the wound was getting deeper.
Friends noticed the change in him during those two weeks between the funeral and spring break. Brian, who’d always been social and outgoing—the kind of guy who knew everyone on campus, who could walk into any party and immediately find people to talk to—had gone quiet. He stopped returning calls as quickly. He skipped study group sessions. His girlfriend Alexis Waggoner, who lived two hours away in Toledo, noticed he was distant when they talked on the phone.
“It’s like he’s there but he’s not there,” Alexis confided to a friend. “I keep asking if he wants me to come down, to be with him, but he keeps saying he’s fine. He’s obviously not fine.”
Brian’s father Randy was worried too, but in that stoic, midwestern father way where worry manifests as silence rather than conversation. Randy had lost his wife of thirty years. He was grieving too. And now he watched his oldest son spiral into something dark and couldn’t figure out how to reach him.
“You need to get away for a while,” Randy told Brian one evening over dinner. The house felt too empty without Renee. “Spring break’s coming up. Why don’t you go somewhere? Take Alexis to the beach. Just get out of Columbus for a few days.”
Brian had nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
He’d already been planning a trip to Miami with Alexis for spring break. They’d booked flights, reserved a hotel. Friends suspected—though Brian had been careful not to confirm it directly—that he was planning to propose during that trip. He’d been looking at rings. He’d asked Alexis’s best friend subtle questions about what kind of jewelry Alexis liked. He’d started saving money.
But before Miami, before he could think about the future, Brian needed to do something else first. He needed one night to forget. One night to be twenty-seven years old again instead of someone drowning in grief and medical school stress and uncertainty about whether he even wanted to be a doctor anymore.
His best friend Clint Florence understood that. Or at least, Clint said he understood.
“Let’s go out,” Clint suggested on the phone that Thursday afternoon, March 30. “Just you and me. We’ll hit the bars on High Street like we used to freshman year. Get drunk. Talk to girls. Be idiots for one night. You need this, man.”
Brian hesitated. He had studying to do. He should call Alexis. He should probably spend time with his father and brother, who were still processing their own grief.
But God, the house was so quiet without his mother. And the studying felt pointless—what was the point of memorizing the branches of the facial nerve when your mother had just died and nothing made sense anymore? And Alexis, as wonderful as she was, kept wanting to talk about feelings, and Brian didn’t have words for what he was feeling.
“Yeah,” Brian finally said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
It was a decision that would cost him everything. Though neither Brian nor Clint knew it at the time, that phone call was setting in motion a series of events that would end with Brian Shaffer becoming a ghost—alive one moment, gone the next, leaving behind nothing but unanswered questions and a family that would never recover.
Friday Night: The Celebration Begins
March 31, 2006 started like any other spring Friday at Ohio State. The campus was buzzing with that electric pre-break energy—students finishing their last exams, making plans for trips to Florida or Mexico, anticipating a week away from papers and studying. High Street, the main drag that runs through campus, would be packed that night with bars offering spring break drink specials.
Brian spent most of the day trying to study. He was behind in his coursework—grief and funeral arrangements had consumed the previous two weeks. But his heart wasn’t in it. The words in his textbooks blurred together. His mind kept drifting to his mother, to the empty chair at the kitchen table, to the sound of his father crying in the middle of the night when he thought no one could hear.
Around 6:00 PM, Brian gave up on studying. He showered, changed clothes, and met Clint Florence at his apartment.
Clint and Brian had been friends since freshman year at Ohio State. They’d lived in the same dorm, pledged the same fraternity, dated roommates for a brief, chaotic period that somehow strengthened rather than ruined their friendship. Where Brian was tall and athletic-looking—he’d played basketball in high school—Clint was shorter, stockier, with the kind of easy charm that made him popular at parties.
They were an odd pair in some ways. Brian was intense, driven, the kind of person who made detailed five-year plans. Clint was more go-with-the-flow, happy to let life happen rather than trying to control it. But they balanced each other out. Brian loosened up around Clint. Clint got more focused around Brian. They were brothers in the way that college friendships sometimes become—chosen family rather than blood.
Or at least, that’s how it seemed until the night Brian disappeared.
The plan was loose: start at one bar, see where the night took them. No pressure, no schedule. Just two friends having drinks and trying to forget, for a few hours, that the world could be cruel and unfair.
They started at the Arena District around 9:00 PM—a newer entertainment complex that had been built downtown. They bar-hopped for a while, doing shots of whiskey that burned going down, chatting with other groups of students also celebrating the start of spring break. Brian seemed lighter than he had in weeks. The alcohol was helping. The distraction was helping.
Around 11:30 PM, they ran into Clint’s friend Meredith Reed. Meredith was a few years younger, an undergraduate who knew Clint through mutual friends. She was friendly, outgoing, the kind of person who fits easily into any social situation.
“Where are you guys headed?” Meredith asked after they’d chatted for a few minutes.
“Probably back toward campus,” Clint said. “Hit up the Ugly Tuna.”
The Ugly Tuna Saloona was a staple of Ohio State nightlife—a bar with a vaguely tropical theme crammed into the second floor of the South Campus Gateway building. It was loud, crowded, sticky-floored, the kind of place where everyone shouted to be heard over the music and you left smelling like beer and other people’s sweat. Brian and Clint had spent countless nights there during their undergraduate years.
“I’ll come with you,” Meredith offered. “I’ve got my car. I can give you a ride.”
The three of them piled into Meredith’s vehicle and headed back toward High Street. The Ugly Tuna sat at 1546 North High Street, tucked into the second floor of what was then called the South Campus Gateway complex—a shopping center with stores on the first floor and entertainment venues above. To reach the bar, you had to ride an escalator up from the ground level.
Security cameras captured Brian, Clint, and Meredith ascending that escalator at 1:15 AM on April 1, 2006. The timestamp is burned into the memory of everyone who’s studied this case. 1:15 AM. Brian looks relaxed, laughing at something Clint just said. He has no idea he has less than forty-five minutes of recorded existence left.
The bar was packed. It was Friday night of spring break weekend, and the Ugly Tuna was one of the few campus bars that stayed open until 2:00 AM. The music was deafening—a mix of early 2000s hip-hop and rock that made conversation nearly impossible. Bodies pressed together near the bar, everyone jostling for the bartenders’ attention.
Brian ordered drinks. He talked to Clint and Meredith, though it’s unclear what they discussed—the music was too loud for anyone nearby to overhear specific conversations. At some point during the next forty minutes, something happened that would later become central to the mystery.
Witnesses would tell police that Brian and Clint got into an argument.
Not a physical fight. Not even shouting. But voices raised enough that people noticed. Something intense enough that Clint’s body language changed—arms crossed, jaw tight, the unmistakable posture of someone angry or defensive.
What were they arguing about? No one knows. Clint has never said. Witnesses couldn’t hear over the music. And Brian, of course, isn’t here to explain.
By 1:45 AM, whatever tension had existed seemed to have passed. Brian was back to his usual self—social, friendly, working the room the way he always did at parties. He’d started talking to two young women near the entrance, trading numbers, making plans that would never happen.
The security camera outside the bar captured this moment. 1:55 AM. Brian standing with those two women, all of them laughing. He looked happy. Or at least, he looked like someone pretending to be happy, which for that night was probably the best he could manage.
The women said goodbye and headed down the escalator. Brian watched them go, then turned back toward the entrance.
According to people inside the bar, Brian said something to Clint or Meredith before he went back in. Different witnesses remember different phrases, but the most commonly reported version is: “I’m going to talk to the band for a minute.”
The Ugly Tuna had a live band that night—a local group playing covers of popular songs. Brian loved music. He’d played guitar in high school. Talking to the band made sense.
Except the band members would later tell police that Brian never approached them. They never spoke to him. They didn’t even remember seeing him near the stage.
So if Brian didn’t talk to the band, where did he go?
The security cameras should have answered that question. Should have shown exactly where Brian went, who he talked to, how he left.
But they didn’t. Because somehow, impossibly, Brian Shaffer walked back into the Ugly Tuna Saloona at 1:55 AM and ceased to exist.
2:00 AM: The Bar Closes
At 2:00 AM, bartenders announced last call. The Ugly Tuna was closing. Everyone had to leave. Bouncers started moving through the crowd, herding drunk students toward the exit, making sure no one tried to hide in the bathrooms or linger by the bar hoping for one more drink.
The crowd filed out in the disorganized, sluggish way that crowds always file out of college bars at 2:00 AM. Some people were belligerent—angry that the night was ending, arguing with bouncers about whether they could finish their drinks. Others were too drunk to walk straight, leaning on friends for support. A few couples made out aggressively near the escalator, unwilling to separate even to navigate the ride down.
The same security cameras that had recorded Brian’s entrance captured all of this. Every person who left was documented—stumbling down the escalator, heading out into the warm April night, dispersing into the streets of Columbus.
Clint Florence and Meredith Reed were among those who left. Security footage shows them exiting around 2:05 AM. They looked around—presumably for Brian—but didn’t seem particularly concerned. The assumption, Clint would later tell police, was that Brian had already left. Maybe he’d found another group of friends. Maybe he’d met a girl and gone home with her. It wasn’t unusual for people to lose track of each other in crowded bars.
“We called his cell phone a few times,” Clint told investigators. “It went straight to voicemail. We figured he was fine. Brian’s a grown man. A medical student. He can take care of himself.”
Meredith drove Clint home. They didn’t discuss Brian further. It was 2:30 AM. They were drunk and tired. They went to bed assuming Brian was doing the same somewhere else.
It wasn’t until the next day—Saturday, April 1, 2006—that anyone realized something might be wrong.
Saturday Afternoon: The Phone Calls
Brian’s girlfriend Alexis tried calling him Saturday morning around 11:00 AM. They had plans to talk about their upcoming Miami trip—final details about flights and hotel reservations. The call went straight to voicemail.
She tried again an hour later. Still nothing.
By early afternoon, Alexis was annoyed. It wasn’t like Brian to ignore her calls, especially when they had specific plans to discuss. She texted him: “Call me when you get this.” No response.
Around the same time, Brian’s father Randy was also trying to reach his son. They had dinner plans for Saturday night—just the two of them, a chance to talk without Derek there, to check in on how Brian was really doing after Renee’s death.
Randy called three times between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM. Every call went to voicemail.
By 5:00 PM, Randy’s annoyance had shifted to concern. Brian was responsible. He always answered his phone or called back within an hour. This silence was uncharacteristic.
Randy drove to Brian’s apartment—a small place off-campus that Brian shared with two roommates. One of the roommates was home.
“Is Brian here?” Randy asked.
“No, sir,” the roommate said. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. His car’s out front, though.”
Randy’s concern crystallized into something sharper: fear. He walked around to the parking lot and found Brian’s car exactly where it should be. He tried the door—unlocked. Inside were Brian’s wallet, his keys, his medical school ID badge. Everything Brian would need if he’d gone somewhere voluntarily.
Randy’s heart began to pound. He called Clint Florence.
“Where’s Brian?” Randy asked, not bothering with pleasantries. “Have you seen him?”
“Not since last night,” Clint said. “We went out to bars. Lost track of each other around 2:00 AM. I figured he went home or—”
“His car’s here,” Randy interrupted. “His wallet’s here. His keys. Alexis can’t reach him. I can’t reach him. When’s the last time you actually saw him?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. When Clint spoke again, his voice had changed—less casual, more uncertain.
“Around 1:55, maybe 2:00 AM. He went back into the Ugly Tuna. Said he was going to talk to the band. Then the bar closed and I assumed—”
“You assumed what?” Randy’s voice was rising now. “You assumed he’d just disappear?”
“Mr. Shaffer, I’m sure there’s an explanation—”
“There better be,” Randy said. “Because if something happened to my son and you were the last person with him—”
The threat hung unspoken in the air. Randy ended the call and immediately dialed the Columbus Police Department to report his son missing.
The Investigation Begins: The Impossible Numbers
Detective John Hurst took the missing person report Saturday evening. At first, it seemed like a routine case—twenty-seven-year-old man goes out drinking, doesn’t come home. Most of these situations resolved themselves within 24 hours. The missing person turned up hungover at a friend’s house or sheepishly admitted they’d spent the night with someone they met at a bar.
But certain details gave Hurst pause.
Brian’s car and personal belongings left behind suggested he hadn’t planned to go anywhere. His phone going straight to voicemail—either the battery was dead, the phone was turned off, or it had been destroyed. And according to his father, Brian was a responsible kid. Medical student. Close to his family. Not the type to disappear without telling anyone.
“Where was he last seen?” Hurst asked.
“The Ugly Tuna Saloona,” Randy Shaffer said. “Around 2:00 AM. His friend Clint Florence was with him.”
Hurst made notes. “We’ll check with the bar. They’ll have security footage. If your son left with someone, we’ll see it.”
On Monday morning, April 3, Detective Hurst arrived at the South Campus Gateway building to collect security footage from the Ugly Tuna Saloona and surrounding businesses. The building’s security system had cameras covering the main entrance, the escalators, and the second-floor walkway where the bar was located.
Hurst spent the next several hours reviewing footage from Friday night into Saturday morning. He found Brian Shaffer easily enough—there he was at 1:15 AM, riding up the escalator with two companions. There he was again at 1:55 AM, talking to two women outside the bar entrance.
Hurst watched as Brian said goodbye to the women and turned back toward the entrance. The camera angle shifted slightly as Brian moved. And then—
Nothing.
Brian didn’t appear on camera again.
Hurst rewound the footage and watched again, paying closer attention. Same result. Brian walking toward the entrance, then gone.
“Maybe he left through another exit,” Hurst thought. He switched to footage from the service door—the only other exit from the bar area. The service door led to a construction area that was being renovated. A camera positioned near that door panned back and forth, covering the area every few seconds.
Hurst watched footage of the construction area from 1:55 AM through 2:30 AM. Several employees left through the service door—bartenders and bouncers heading home after closing. But none of them matched Brian’s description. None were 6’2″ with dark hair.
Hurst switched back to the main entrance footage and began the tedious process of counting. He made a tally mark for every person who entered the bar after 1:15 AM. Then he switched to the closing time footage and counted every person who left.
After three hours of counting and recounting, checking and double-checking his math, Hurst reached an impossible conclusion:
Sixty-eight people entered the Ugly Tuna Saloona between 1:15 AM and 2:00 AM on the morning of April 1, 2006.
Sixty-seven people left.
The numbers didn’t match. One person went in who never came out.
That person was Brian Shaffer.
The Search, The Silence, and The Heartbreak That Never Ends
April 3, 2006: The Impossible Mathematics
Detective John Hurst sat in the cramped security office of the South Campus Gateway building, surrounded by monitors showing grainy black-and-white footage from multiple camera angles. He’d been reviewing the same segments for hours now, and each viewing brought the same impossible conclusion.
The math didn’t work.
On a legal pad in front of him, Hurst had made two columns of tally marks. The left column represented every person who’d entered the Ugly Tuna Saloona between 1:15 AM and 2:00 AM on April 1st. The right column represented every person who’d left when the bar closed.
Left column: 68 marks.
Right column: 67 marks.
He’d counted three times. Had another officer count independently. Brought in a tech specialist to help identify individuals. The number never changed.
Sixty-eight people went into that bar. Sixty-seven came out.
The missing person was Brian Shaffer.
“How is this possible?” Hurst muttered to himself, rubbing his temples. He’d worked missing persons cases for twelve years. People didn’t just vanish from rooms with security cameras on every exit. There was always an explanation—they’d left through a window, or hidden in a bathroom, or changed clothes to avoid recognition.
But Brian Shaffer was 6’2″ tall. He had distinctive features—brown hair, hazel eyes, a Pearl Jam tattoo on his upper right arm. He’d been wearing jeans and a blue-green striped shirt. Not exactly easy to disguise in the five minutes between when he was last seen and when the bar closed.
Hurst switched to the footage from the service exit again. This exit led to a construction area—the building was being renovated, and that section was filled with scaffolding, exposed drywall, tools, and building materials. A camera positioned near the service door panned back and forth across the area, covering different sections every few seconds.
“Could he have gone through here?” Hurst wondered aloud.
He watched the panning camera footage carefully. Several employees used the service exit—bartenders and bouncers who worked at the Ugly Tuna. But none of them matched Brian’s description. And more importantly, navigating that construction zone would have been difficult even for someone sober. Brian had been drinking for hours. The route was dark, filled with obstacles, dangerous.
Still, it was possible. If Brian had somehow made it through the construction area, it led to a first-floor hallway. That hallway had its own exterior exit. Once outside, Brian could have gone anywhere—to a friend’s apartment, to another bar, to his own place.
Except his car was still parked at his apartment. His wallet and keys were inside. His cell phone was going straight to voicemail.
Where would Brian go without his car or wallet?
Hurst made a note to search the construction area thoroughly—maybe Brian had fallen while trying to navigate it. Maybe he was injured somewhere in that building, unable to call for help.
But even as he wrote the note, Hurst knew it was a long shot. They’d already done a preliminary search. No sign of Brian anywhere.
“There’s something we’re missing,” Hurst said to the building manager, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner. “Something about how this building is laid out. Are there any other exits? Any maintenance passages? Anything not covered by cameras?”
The manager shook his head. “Just the main entrance and the service door. That’s it.”
“Windows?”
“Second floor. Twenty feet up. No fire escape on that side.”
Hurst leaned back in his chair, staring at the frozen image of Brian Shaffer walking back toward the bar entrance at 1:55 AM. The timestamp burned in the corner: 01:55:32.
In approximately four and a half minutes, this young man would cease to exist in any verifiable way.
How?
The question would haunt Hurst for years. It would haunt Brian’s family forever. And it would transform Brian Shaffer’s disappearance from a missing person case into one of the most baffling mysteries in Ohio history.
The Search: Every Stone Unturned
Over the next two weeks, Columbus Police conducted one of the most thorough searches in the department’s history. They weren’t just looking for Brian—they were looking for any evidence that might explain the impossible.
The construction area was searched multiple times. Officers climbed through scaffolding, moved equipment, checked every corner where someone might have fallen or hidden. Cadaver dogs were brought in—highly trained German Shepherds whose noses could detect human remains even under concrete or behind walls.
The dogs found nothing.
The entire Gateway building was searched floor by floor, room by room. Storage closets. Electrical rooms. Bathrooms. Every business in the complex was contacted, every employee interviewed. Security footage from surrounding businesses was collected and reviewed.
No sign of Brian.
A dive team searched the Olentangy River, which ran near campus. Volunteers organized search parties, walking through neighborhoods around High Street, checking alleys and abandoned buildings. Brian’s face was on every news channel, every newspaper.
Randy Shaffer, Brian’s father, became a constant presence at the police station. He appeared on local news programs begging anyone with information to come forward. He organized volunteer search efforts, printing thousands of flyers with Brian’s photo and distributing them across Columbus.
“My son didn’t just disappear,” Randy told reporters, his voice raw with emotion. “Someone knows something. Someone saw something. Please, if you know anything—anything at all—call the police.”
Alexis Waggoner, Brian’s girlfriend, drove down from Toledo and stayed with Brian’s family. She gave multiple interviews, describing Brian as responsible, loving, excited about their upcoming Miami trip. “He was planning to propose,” she said through tears. “We were going to start our lives together. He wouldn’t just leave. Something happened to him.”
Brian’s brother Derek joined the search efforts, taking time off work to help organize volunteer teams. He walked the streets of Columbus for days, showing Brian’s photo to anyone who’d look.
But as days turned into weeks with no new leads, the media attention began to fade. Other stories took priority. Volunteers went back to their normal lives. The search parties grew smaller.
Only the family kept looking, driven by a desperate hope that was slowly being crushed under the weight of impossible mathematics and absent answers.
The Best Friend Who Refused to Cooperate
Among all the mysteries surrounding Brian’s disappearance, one question bothered investigators more than any other: Why wouldn’t Clint Florence take a polygraph test?
Clint had been the last person to see Brian. He’d spent the entire evening with him. He’d been there when Brian walked back into the bar. According to basic investigative protocol, Clint should have been willing to do anything to help find his missing best friend—including submitting to a lie detector test.
Instead, Clint lawyered up and refused.
“Mr. Florence, we just want to eliminate you as a person of interest,” Detective Hurst explained during one of several interviews. “A polygraph would help us do that. It would help us focus our investigation elsewhere.”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Clint said, his attorney sitting beside him. “Brian went back into the bar. I lost track of him. When the bar closed, I assumed he’d left on his own. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
“We want you to take a polygraph,” Hurst said flatly. “It’s a simple test. If you’re telling the truth, you have nothing to worry about.”
Clint’s attorney leaned forward. “My client has no obligation to submit to a polygraph. He’s cooperated fully with your investigation. He’s answered all your questions. Unless you’re charging him with something, we’re done here.”
Hurst tried multiple times—different approaches, different officers, different tactics. Each time, Clint refused. Each time, his attorney shut down the request.
This refusal raised immediate red flags. In missing person cases, the last person to see the victim alive is always scrutinized carefully. Their willingness to cooperate—to take polygraphs, to allow searches of their homes and vehicles, to submit phone records—often determines how quickly they can be eliminated as suspects.
Clint’s refusal to cooperate fully made him look guilty. Or at minimum, made it look like he was hiding something.
But of what? There was no evidence of foul play. No blood. No signs of struggle. No witnesses reporting an altercation between Brian and Clint. The security footage showed them entering the bar together without any apparent tension.
Well—mostly without tension.
Several witnesses who’d been at the Ugly Tuna that night reported seeing Brian and Clint in what appeared to be a heated discussion. Not a fight, exactly. But raised voices. Body language suggesting disagreement. One witness described it as Clint looking “pissed off” while Brian seemed to be trying to calm him down.
What were they arguing about?
Clint claimed he didn’t remember any argument. “We were drunk,” he told police. “Maybe we were talking loudly because of the music. I don’t recall being upset about anything.”
But the witnesses were consistent in their descriptions. Something had happened between Brian and Clint that night. Something that made Clint angry enough that people twenty feet away noticed.
And now Brian was missing, and Clint wouldn’t take a polygraph test.
The optics were terrible. Online forums dedicated to Brian’s case filled with speculation about Clint’s involvement. Some theorized he’d killed Brian in a drunken fight and hidden the body. Others suggested Clint knew what happened to Brian but was protecting someone else.
Clint’s attorney released a statement defending his client’s decision: “Clint Florence is devastated by Brian’s disappearance. He’s cooperated fully with police and will continue to do so. However, polygraph tests are notoriously unreliable and inadmissible in court. Mr. Florence is not obligated to submit to one, and his refusal should not be construed as evidence of guilt.”
Legally, the attorney was correct. Polygraph tests are not admissible as evidence in most courts. They’re investigative tools, nothing more. Refusing to take one doesn’t prove guilt.
But it also doesn’t prove innocence. And in the absence of any other explanation for Brian’s impossible disappearance, Clint’s refusal became the thing people focused on.
To this day, nearly two decades later, Clint Florence has never publicly explained his decision. He’s never given a media interview. He’s never appeared on the true crime podcasts that have covered Brian’s case. He moved away from Columbus years ago and has effectively vanished from public view—not physically, like Brian, but socially.
Whatever Clint knows—or doesn’t know—about what happened to his best friend remains locked behind attorney-client privilege and a refusal to speak.
April 20, 2006: The Phone That Came Back to Life
Three weeks after Brian disappeared, something strange happened.
His cell phone—which had been going straight to voicemail since the early morning hours of April 1st—suddenly connected to a cell tower.
The tower was located in Hilliard, Ohio, approximately 14 miles northwest of Columbus. The ping occurred on April 20th at 3:47 PM. The phone stayed connected for approximately eight minutes, then went dead again.
Randy Shaffer was immediately notified by police. He tried calling Brian’s number. It went to voicemail.
Detectives triangulated the general area where the phone had pinged—a suburban neighborhood in Hilliard with single-family homes, a small shopping center, and a section of wooded parkland. Teams searched the area extensively.
They found nothing.
No phone. No Brian. No explanation for why the phone would suddenly power on nearly three weeks after Brian’s disappearance, connect briefly to a tower 14 miles from where he’d last been seen, then go silent again.
“Could someone have found the phone and turned it on?” Randy asked investigators.
“Possible,” Detective Hurst admitted. “But if someone found it, why wouldn’t they call any of the numbers in the contacts? Why wouldn’t they turn it in to police? Brian’s disappearance was all over the news. Anyone finding his phone would have known it was connected to a missing person case.”
The more disturbing possibility was that Brian himself had turned the phone on. That he was alive, in Hilliard, and for some reason couldn’t or wouldn’t make contact with his family.
But that theory created more questions than answers. If Brian was alive, why not call for help? Why not contact his family, who were desperately searching for him? If he’d left voluntarily, where had he been for three weeks? How was he surviving without money, ID, or his car?
And if someone else had Brian—if he’d been kidnapped or was being held against his will—why would his captors allow him access to his phone, even briefly?
The phone ping became another impossible piece of an impossible puzzle.
September 2006: The Phone Rings Again
Six months after Brian disappeared, Alexis Waggoner did something she’d done hundreds of times since April 1st—she called Brian’s cell phone.
She wasn’t expecting an answer. She never did anymore. Sometimes she called just to hear his voicemail greeting, to hear his voice saying, “Hey, this is Brian. Leave a message.” It was a small way of keeping him alive in her heart.
But on this particular day in September 2006, something different happened.
The phone rang.
Not one ring before going to voicemail. Multiple rings. As if the phone was turned on, charged, and sitting somewhere waiting to be answered.
Alexis’s heart nearly stopped. She clutched the phone with shaking hands, counting the rings. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
On the sixth ring, the call went to voicemail.
She immediately called Randy Shaffer. “Brian’s phone is on. It’s ringing. Someone has it turned on.”
Randy called the police. They tried calling Brian’s number. It went straight to voicemail again—as if whoever had briefly powered it on had turned it off immediately after Alexis’s call.
Cell phone records showed Alexis’s call had connected to a tower in the Columbus area, but the location couldn’t be pinpointed more precisely than a several-mile radius.
Detectives analyzed Brian’s phone records from the months since his disappearance. That September call was the only time the phone had been powered on long enough to ring. There had been no outgoing calls. No texts. No data usage.
The phone had simply turned on long enough to ring six times, then gone silent again.
“Someone’s playing games with us,” Randy said, his frustration boiling over. “Someone has Brian’s phone and they’re taunting us.”
But to what end? If someone had harmed Brian and taken his phone as a trophy, why power it on occasionally? Why risk detection? Cell phones in 2006 could be tracked when turned on. Modern technology might not be able to pinpoint exact locations, but general areas could be identified.
The more disturbing possibility was that the phone’s behavior was random—battery glitches, power fluctuations, technical errors that meant nothing at all.
Or it meant Brian was out there somewhere, turning his phone on for brief moments when he felt safe enough to do so, but too afraid or unable to actually use it.
Every theory was simultaneously plausible and impossible.
A Father’s Breaking Heart
Randy Shaffer aged ten years in the first six months after Brian disappeared. The man who’d appeared on news programs in April—earnest, hopeful, determined—had transformed by October into someone hollowed out by grief and unanswered questions.
He’d lost his wife Renee to cancer in March 2006. Barely two weeks later, his oldest son vanished. The double blow was too much for any human being to bear.
Randy spent every waking hour searching for answers. He hired private investigators. He consulted with psychics—something he’d always dismissed as nonsense, but grief makes people willing to grasp at anything. He drove to Hilliard repeatedly, walking the neighborhoods where Brian’s phone had pinged, knocking on doors, showing Brian’s photo to anyone who’d look.
“Have you seen my son?” became Randy’s mantra. He said it hundreds of times. Thousands. To police officers and news reporters and complete strangers on the street.
Most people looked at him with pity and shook their heads. A few offered theories—maybe Brian had amnesia, maybe he’d joined a cult, maybe he’d started a new life somewhere. Randy listened to everything, pursued every lead no matter how absurd.
His health began to deteriorate. The stress triggered cardiac issues. His blood pressure skyrocketed. Friends worried he was killing himself with the search, but Randy couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.
“I can’t give up on him,” Randy told his younger son Derek. “Brian’s out there somewhere. I know it. I can feel it. And I’m going to find him or die trying.”
Derek watched helplessly as his father slowly fell apart. “Dad, you need to take care of yourself. Mom would want—”
“Don’t,” Randy cut him off. “Don’t tell me what your mother would want. She’d want me to find our son. That’s what she’d want.”
By 2007, Randy had spent over $100,000 of his retirement savings on the search. Private investigators. Reward money. Travel costs. Legal fees related to filing Freedom of Information requests for police records. He’d remortgaged his house. Sold Renee’s car. Liquidated every asset he had.
Nothing brought Brian home.
In early 2008, Randy’s health took a serious turn. He was hospitalized with heart problems. Doctors told him his stress levels were unsustainable—he was literally working himself to death.
“I don’t care,” Randy said from his hospital bed. “I’ll rest when I find my son.”
He never did find his son.
Randy Shaffer died on June 13, 2008, from a massive heart attack. He was sixty-one years old. Friends and family said he died of a broken heart—the kind of cardiac damage that comes not from cholesterol or genetics, but from grief so profound it stops the heart from beating.
In less than two and a half years, Derek Shaffer had lost his mother, his brother, and his father. He was twenty-five years old and suddenly alone in a way few people his age could comprehend.
At Randy’s funeral, Derek gave a eulogy that left no dry eyes in the church: “My father died searching for my brother. He never stopped believing Brian was alive. He never stopped hoping we’d find him. I promised him—the last time I saw him before he died—I promised I’d keep searching. That I’d never give up. That someday, somehow, we’d bring Brian home. I intend to keep that promise.”
Derek Shaffer still keeps that promise today. He maintains a Facebook page dedicated to finding Brian. He responds to tips. He consults with investigators. He gives interviews to podcasts and documentary filmmakers.
He’s spent nearly two decades searching for his brother, knowing full well that the most likely outcome is that Brian died the night he disappeared, that his body is somewhere it will never be found, that the truth died with him.
But Derek keeps searching anyway. Because that’s what you do for family. Because hope, however irrational, is sometimes all that keeps you moving forward.
The Theories: Trying to Explain the Inexplicable
In the nineteen years since Brian Shaffer walked into the Ugly Tuna Saloona and never walked out, dozens of theories have been proposed to explain his disappearance. Some are plausible. Some are outlandish. None have ever been proven.
Theory 1: The Construction Exit
The most commonly cited theory is that Brian left through the construction area exit while intoxicated. Despite the difficulties navigating that space sober, Brian might have been so drunk he didn’t realize the danger. He could have fallen, hit his head, and his body could have been accidentally disposed of during construction cleanup. Dumpsters full of construction debris were hauled away regularly—if Brian’s body was among that debris, it might have ended up in a landfill.
Police searched the landfill that serviced the construction site, but it was a massive operation. They couldn’t search every square foot. Brian’s body could still be there, buried under tons of trash and debris.
Theory 2: Voluntary Disappearance
Some people believe Brian left voluntarily—overwhelmed by grief over his mother’s death, stressed about medical school, uncertain about his future. According to this theory, Brian used the chaos of the bar closing to slip away undetected. He changed clothes somehow, kept his head down, and walked out among the crowd. He then started a new life somewhere else.
But this theory has problems. Brian left without money, ID, or his car. His phone has barely been used since his disappearance. And most damning—Brian’s personality doesn’t fit this scenario. Everyone who knew him says he wouldn’t abandon his family, especially not after his mother just died.
Theory 3: Foul Play by Someone He Knew
This is the theory many people whisper but few state outright: that someone Brian knew—possibly Clint Florence—was involved in his disappearance. The argument witnessed at the bar. Clint’s refusal to take a polygraph. His suspicious behavior afterward. All of it points to someone who knows more than he’s saying.
But there’s no evidence. No blood. No weapon. No witness to any crime. And no motive—Clint and Brian were best friends. What could have happened that would make Clint want to harm him?
Theory 4: Random Attack
Perhaps Brian left the bar through an exit not captured clearly on camera, and was attacked by someone he encountered outside. Columbus near campus can be dangerous late at night. Brian could have been mugged, killed, and his body hidden somewhere.
But Brian’s wallet and keys were found in his apartment—not on his person. Why would a random attacker target him?
Theory 5: Accidental Death
Maybe Brian, heavily intoxicated, made a decision that led to accidental death. He tried to climb down from the second floor somehow, fell, and landed in a space where his body wasn’t found during searches. Or he wandered away from the bar, fell into the Olentangy River, and drowned.
But wouldn’t his body have been found by now?
None of these theories fully explains everything. Each has holes. Each requires believing in remarkable coincidences or unlikely scenarios.
Which means the truth—whatever it is—might be something no one has thought of yet. Something so bizarre or specific to the circumstances of that night that it defies easy categorization.
2025: Nineteen Years of Silence
Brian Shaffer would be forty-six years old now. The Ohio Attorney General’s office released an age-progression image in 2021 showing what Brian might look like today—graying hair, deeper wrinkles, the face of middle age replacing the face of youth.
The image was distributed across social media, featured on news programs, sent to law enforcement agencies nationwide. The hope was that someone, somewhere, would recognize the face and come forward.
No one did.
Brian’s girlfriend Alexis moved on with her life, eventually marrying someone else. She still thinks about Brian, she’s said in interviews. Still wonders what happened. But after nineteen years, she’s accepted that she’ll probably never know.
Derek Shaffer continues his lonely vigil. He’s now forty-two—older than Brian was when he disappeared. He’s built a life, has a career, but the search for his brother remains a constant presence.
“I think about him every day,” Derek said in a recent interview. “I wonder where he is. If he’s alive somewhere. If he’s dead, where his body is. If he thinks about us. If he knows how hard we’ve looked for him.”
The case remains open with Columbus Police and the FBI. Brian is listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). His case file has been reviewed multiple times by cold case units, but no new evidence has emerged.
Clint Florence has never spoken publicly about Brian’s disappearance beyond his initial police statements. He’s moved away from Ohio. He’s built a life far from the scrutiny and suspicion. Whatever he knows—or doesn’t know—remains with him.
The Ugly Tuna Saloona closed years ago. The building still stands, but the bar space has been converted to other uses. On certain spring nights, students walking past sometimes stop and talk about the mystery—the medical student who walked in and never walked out.
Some claim the space is haunted. That late at night, you can hear music from 2006. That shadows move in ways they shouldn’t. That sometimes, if you stand where Brian was last seen on camera, you feel a presence—like someone is standing next to you, trying to tell you something but unable to form words.
Ghost stories, probably. The kind of urban legends that grow up around unsolved mysteries.
But maybe—just maybe—Brian Shaffer is still there somehow. Still trying to tell everyone what happened. Still trying to come home to the family that never stopped looking for him.
Or maybe he’s been gone since 1:55 AM on April 1, 2006. Gone in the five minutes between the last time anyone saw him and the time everyone left the bar.
Gone in a way that defies explanation. Gone in a way that haunts everyone who’s studied this case. Gone in a way that proves, sometimes, people really can vanish into thin air.
And the only people who might know the truth aren’t talking.
FOR INFORMATION ON BRIAN SHAFFER:
If you have any information about Brian’s disappearance, please contact:
Columbus Police Department: (614) 645-4545
FBI Tips: 1-800-CALL-FBI
Crime Stoppers Anonymous: (614) 461-8477
Brian Randall Shaffer: Missing since April 1, 2006, from Columbus, Ohio. Last seen at the Ugly Tuna Saloona. He was 27 years old, 6’2″, 165 lbs, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Distinctive features include a Pearl Jam tattoo on his upper right arm and a dot on the iris of his left eye. If you have any information, please contact authorities. A family is still waiting for answers.
